A Multimedia Broadcast and Multicast Service (MBMS) is provided to efficiently transmit multimedia data to a plurality of users in a 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) mobile communication network.
Since a uni-directional multicast bearer is defined in the MBMS rather than a conventional bi-directional unicast bearer, and multicast data are transmitted to a plurality of user terminals through the uni-directional multicast bearer in a network, resources may be efficiently used.
To provide the MBMS, it is required to perform a service announcement (SA). When the service announcement is performed, a network gives information on the MBMS service to terminals in the network. The information (i.e., metadata) transmitted from the network to the terminal by the service announcement includes a name of each MBMS service, a service identifier, a service type, and Internet protocol (IP)/user datagram protocol (UDP) parameters (i.e., a multicast IP address, and a UDP port) for receiving a service.
The service announcement is realized by various methods. In addition, the service announcement is efficiently transmitted when it is transmitted by using the MBMS, since it has a multicast service characteristic. That is, the metadata for the service announcement are defined as the “service announcement (SA)” in the MBMS service, and are multicast from a network to a terminal through a corresponding MBMS bearer.
However, to receive the metadata for the service announcement, the terminal needs to have a service identifier, a multicast IP address, and a UDP port to establish the corresponding MBMS bearer.
While the information for the conventional MBMS service that includes the service identifier, the multicast IP address, and the UDP port is transmitted to the terminal by the metadata, the information for the “service announcement” service may not be transmitted to the terminal by the metadata since it is required to be transmitted to the terminal before receiving the metadata.
The above information disclosed in this Background section is only for enhancement of understanding of the background of the invention and therefore it may contain information that does not form the prior art that is already known in this country to a person of ordinary skill in the art.